Mind versus tree navigation; html versus rtf editing

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Mar 9, 2007 at 09:42 PM

Graham Rhind wrote:
>There are
>programs which base themselves on rtf, such as Whizfolders, which gives great
>editing and export possibilities but brings limitations such as poor image support,
>poor table support and inability to properly store html snippets. Then there are
>programs such as Surfulator which harness the power of html but don’t allow the
>editing flexibility of rtf systems. Are there any outliners which have managed to
>merge the two environments successfully?

Graham,

The first program that came to mind when I read your question is The Journal (http://www.davidrm.com). Like all these programs, it too presents a compromise, but I think David Michael, the developer, does a pretty good job in coaxing the power out of his application. The editor is very robust and seems to handle graphics and tables pretty well. The “outliner” is fairly cumbersome, but is useful. All in all, The Journal is a nice application for writers, with multiple notebooks that can be accessed through tabs, automatic daily journal pages, and a host of other tools. As has been stated about Whizfolders, in The Journal you can apply keywords (what The Journal refers to as Topics) to individual sections of text for later searching.

As for your other observation about slick navigation PIMs having limited power for editing and data management, I think you’re dead on. Not only are the editors usually pretty rudimentary, they usually lack meta data capability. I’ll be interested to see if anyone suggests a powerful PIM with a slick navigation system.

Steve Z.